NESL's language based performance model is a formal way to
calculate the "work" and "depth" of a program. These measures
can be related to running time on a parallel computer.

NESL was designed to make parallel programming easy and
portable. Algorithms are typically more concise in NESL than
in most other parallel programming languages and the code
resembles high-level pseudocode. This places more
responsibility on the compiler and run-time system for
achieving good efficiency.